302	ADDRESSES    ON    LITERATURE
Students may then have exercised their minds on how
to discourse persuasively, or on the art of eloquence.,
may have dogmatized on the propriety of words and
similes, on forms of speech and verse: but that is
only the technique of literature., the merest skeleton,
the dry bones or what we now understand by literary
study.
With literature as a product of the creative imagina-
tion the mediaeval university would have nothing
to do. The imagination, as an undisciplined and
undisciplinable thing—a dangerous and upsetting
enemy to clear logical thinking—was tabu In the
universities of the old world. I say the imagination;
but until that great Thirty Years7 War of European
controversy, the Querelk des antiens et des modernes at
the end of the seventeenth century, nobody really
knew what the imagination was at all
It is true that back in antiquity a very modern
minded thinker, Quintilian (who might to-day be
more profitably studied than he is) had caught a
glimpse of this strange, mystic faculty. In his
Institutes are flashes of insight about the imagination
fraught with deep import; but they passed unnoticed
or misunderstood. The whole purpose of every
Ars poetica of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
down to the eighteenth century, was not to under-
stand or promote the use of the imagination, but to
fetter it, to banish it, or at least to keep it severely
in its place as the potential enemy of human reason,
and, where the writing of poetry was concerned,
as something that could only upset the equilibrium
of that "buon gusto", good taste, of the right-
thinking man.
When these older generations thought about
literature, it was only to regard It as a practical
application of logical thinking. Not until the begin-
ning of the eighteenth century did it dawn on the
world that the supreme governing force—the essential
factor in poetry—was not the reason at all, but just